P2Pool currently works well, that’s true. But there is a plan to restart p2pool shares chain after 20 Sep 2013.

New NVC protocol changes will be activated since this date, allowing us to remove ECDSA signatures for PoW blocks and 0.01 coin lower bound for coinbase outputs. So, P2Pool diff with upstream will become significantly smaller than diff of current P2Pool implementation. Also it will provide an opportunity to run public nodes without current limitations.